Packers' owners share civic pride - in the stands

Updated 9:13 am, Sunday, January 5, 2014

I hung out with the owner of the Green Bay Packers on Saturday morning. We talked franchise history, matchups, revenue streams.

And then she gave me a home-baked Christmas cookie.

And some advice about how to keep my feet warm.

Bea Froelich, 74, has three framed Green Bay Packers stock certificates on her wall. Those make her as much an owner of the publicly held team as anyone else.

That's one of the most charming things about the Packers. Bea is one of the reasons that a town of 100,000 people can support an NFL team that plays in a stadium that holds 80,000. One of the reasons that the team has never moved to a bigger market or put a dome on Lambeau Field, where temperatures are expected to be around zero at game time Sunday. Part of the magic that makes the Packers the most unusual franchise in professional sports.

"It's a romantic story of a community that wouldn't let their football team die or move away," said Ed Policy, the Packers' vice president and general counsel and the son of former 49ers executive Carmen Policy. "The community supported the team through rocky times. There's no ownership structure like it in all of sports."

There aren't many unique things about the NFL, especially since Al Davis died. It's a cookie cutter league of corporate names and strip-mall-similar franchises. But the Packers are refreshingly different. They're a throwback to the early days and a needed reminder that the league hasn't always been about multimillionaire owners who require private elevators in their stadiums, as Washington's Dan Snyder does.

Though general manager Ted Thompson, who answers to a seven-member executive committee, runs the Packers, the team also has a 43-member board of directors and 36,400 registered shareholders.

The actual stock certificates on Bea's wall can't be resold and have little actual value beyond being cute tchotchkes to pass along to the grandchildren. But the funds raised from their sales have gone to renovate Lambeau Field. And their value is intrinsic.

"It makes you feel that you're a part of it," Bea said.

She has certainly been a part of it, ever since she was a fourth-grader, living near the old Packers stadium. Her father played trombone in the Packers' band. At one game his trombone froze up completely. When she was a teenager, Bea and her sister parked cars at the old stadium for 50 cents a car. And before the new stadium opened in 1959, she and her high school boyfriend, Bill, bought season tickets, when they were $5 per game.

She's had the tickets ever since: After she and Bill got married and had three children. When they bought a house on Oneida - across the street from Lambeau Field. During the magical 1996 season, when she and Bill followed the team to New Orleans for its first Super Bowl of the modern era. After Bill died in 2010. And as her tickets went up 1,600 percent from their original price.

In all those years, Bea has missed one game, in September 1983. She was a part-time swim teacher and had to take her students to a training session. Other than that, she's been at every game held at Lambeau Field. Five days before she gave birth to her son. Through the Ice Bowl, the Snow Bowl, the Mud Bowl. Her tickets are organized in plastic sheets by year in binders.

And Bea never leaves early, even with her warm kitchen just across the street. She didn't leave the Ice Bowl when the temperature dropped to minus-18 and the rest of her family went home.

The stadium was fairly empty that day in 1967. Bea expects there to be plenty of vacant seats at the game against the 49ers on Sunday. As an unofficial team historian, she can attest that this will be one of the coldest games in Packers history.

"Don't step on that snow," she warned, advising visitors to bring a piece of cardboard to put under their feet. She also might bring swim goggles, because her eyeballs will freeze and sting.

The weather forecast is just one reason Sunday's game wasn't a sellout until Friday afternoon, when the remaining tickets were bought up by the team's corporate sponsors. Bea thinks it also hurt that the Packers sold playoff tickets while Aaron Rodgers was hurt and the team was losing, and that the team wasn't willing to refund the money if the Packers didn't make the postseason - just roll the funds over to next year's season tickets.

That's the kind of decision that affects a working-class community like Green Bay. This town isn't full of high rollers jamming into luxury suites, though it is, I can attest, the kind of place where the car in front of you at the Starbucks drive-through pays for your order before you even get to the window.

When the ash tree in Bea's front yard died seven years ago, she and Bill hired a friend to carve it into the shape of the Lombardi Trophy. Now people tramp across the snow in her front yard to take their picture by the trophy. Party buses use it as a landmark, meeting passengers in front.

Her house has become a landmark. And from the window of her dining nook, Bea can see the Lambeau JumboTron.

But that's not close enough. On Sunday, she'll put on five or six layers and walk across the street to sit in likely subzero weather. Because that's what Packers owners do.

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